The paper aims to examine the socio-demographic profiles of international scholars in Slovakia and the motivations which local higher education institutions have in hiring them. Slovakia is understood as a model semi-peripheral country in the global system of knowledge production. We rely on data from the Slovak Register of Higher Education Institutions Employees and an onomastic method which enabled us to identify particular international scholars. A multivariate analysis of public data allowed us to create an image of this heterogeneous group and reveal relationships between the share of foreigners employed by Slovak higher education institutions and the characteristics of these institutions. This supports the assumption that foreign-born faculty members serve primarily as a solution to the problem of qualified workforce shortages and should not be viewed as a sign of academic excellence.